Welcome back!
As usual, there’s a lot of stuff going on. Before we get into that, I want to drop a link to an incredibly poignant article written by Tim O’Brien, National Book Award winner and author of The Things They Carried, over at LitHub. In it, he reflects on war, remembrance, and the paradox of experience. It would of course be sloppy to draw too many parallels between the Vietnam-era United States and our own unique historical moment, but nonetheless, O’Brien calls attention to some very important issues.
Armed with a nuanced historical perspective, go check out this article. Susan B. Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker, has the takeaways from this week’s Trump shenanigans. Speaking of men throwing temper tantrums, Eileen Pollack, creative writing instructor in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, wrote a wonderful article over at LitHub about this very thing. She situates the rise of incels in the context of the Unabomber.
In celebration of the approaching NBA season, and speaking of young men understanding the world, go check out this article over at LitHub about youth and pickup basketball. Here is the rundown of the controversial comments made by LeBron James about the protests in Hong Kong, and here is a hilarious article from McSweeney’s in response.
Finally, for fun, here is LitHub’s list of the best poetry collections of the decade, and here your favorite songs pictured as vintage book covers.
Until next week!